Spending Spree

There have been a few interesting developments in Liverpool's rail infrastructure these last few weeks but I've not mentioned them on here because, frankly, I've had other things to do with my time.  However, the BF has ABANDONED me to go and watch some sort of football match so I may as well kill my evening writing a load of nonsense about railway stations.

The biggest news has of course been the allocation of £1.6 billion by the treasury to try and stem the plummeting approval ratings improve transport in the Liverpool City Region.   Part of this will be spent on Bus Rapid Transits to connect the Airport and the two football stadia with the city centre.  Bus Rapid Transits are great.  They're a sort of cheaper tram, with long bendy buses, dedicated transport lanes, and raised platforms to allow level boarding.  Here's a BRT stop in Curitiba, Brazil, which is undeniably funky.

Liverpool's system won't be like that.  It'll have the longer bendy buses, of course: Close Personal Friend Of The Blog Steve Rotheram posed with a mock-up outside Anfield: 

The rest of it?  Not so much.  The route from the airport to the city is two lane avenues which could, theoretically, have one lane fully segregated for buses in each direction with stops built on the central reservation.  That's what you'd need for a BRT.  It probably won't be that though, seeing as Steve has been loath to even reverse the anti-bus lane policy of Joe Anderson.  Plus, that two lane avenue stops in the Dingle, forcing an airport express to negotiate packed city streets through Toxteth or down Riverside Drive, a single carriageway road lined with residences and parkland.  

Getting to Anfield is even tougher; the Walton Breck Road is narrow, has many side streets, and has homes with front doors opening right on the pavement.  Plus they close much of it on a match day anyway.  As for Everton's new stadium - the Hill Dickinson Stadium, which is a whole embarrassing thing of its own - both Regent Road and Great Howard Street have received huge upgrades in recent years.  Regent Road was narrowed to incorporate a cycle lane along its length and Great Howard Street was made into a dual carriageway throughout.  Neither of these improvements, you'll note, included space for a Bus Rapid Transit.

Nice buses though.

Speaking of Everton, the fact that 50,000 people will be turning up to the docks at least once a week for the next few decades has prompted Merseytravel to take decisive action to get them there.  They've built a long chain of fences for people to queue in at Sandhills, the closest station, and they've applied to build the following great improvement to handle the crowds.

It's a staircase with a bridge and a bit of a ramp so there's a second way up to the platform.  That's it.  Sandhills is still a single island platform on a side road that was never built to handle that volume of crowds.  It was built for people to change lines, mainly, because the area around it is light industrial units in the main.  It needs a massive upgrade - perhaps with side platforms and new entrances - which is more than a single staircase.  Perhaps this is an issue that should've been addressed when planning permission was given to Everton?  Perhaps they should've been asked to contribute to the costs, seeing as they're the ones causing the need for it to be rebuilt?  Perhaps there should've been a bit more planning?

Actually the very best thing to do would be to build a whole new station.  There have been vague plans for a new stop on the Northern Line at Vauxhall, plans I've mentioned many times over the course of this blog.  Here's a piece on it from 2014.  The issues then are still issues today; there isn't the population or employment to justify building it, but part of the reason there isn't the population or employment is because there aren't great transport links to the area like, for example, a Merseyrail station.  

Things have changed in that intervening decade though.  There's that bloody great football stadium for a start.  The Titanic Hotel has opened, and the Stanley Dock is progressing as a residential development in stages.  New apartments have sprung up by the canal and the city centre is creeping north along Regent Road.  The time to build it would be now, while land values are still sufficiently low and before some canny developer snaps up the land and holds the region to ransom.  So expect to see that open in, oooh, 2076?

"But wait!" I hear you cry.  "Didn't they get £1.6 billion?  Can't they spend that on a new station?"  Of course they can, and of course they will.  Just not this station.  Steve-o is very keen on sharing the wealth around the six boroughs that make up the Liverpool City Region, and that means everyone gets a nice new station.  Sefton got Maghull North in 2018; Knowsley got Headbolt Lane in 2023; and Liverpool itself will get Baltic in - well who knows, but theoretically before the end of the decade.  Building Vauxhall station would mean Liverpool would get two new stations in a row which obviously cannot stand.  It doesn't matter that Liverpool is the centre of the city region, the hub around which it flows; it doesn't matter that there's a strong case for it being built.  The other boroughs have to get their turn first.  

Three new stations have been announced.  Carr Mill is in St Helens, out on the East Lancs Road, and will serve the north side of the town.  It'll allow a park and ride to be built and, as you can see from the picture above, there's a load of nice empty fields next to it that could be covered with a lot of cul-de-sacs.  Trains will run from here to Liverpool and Wigan on the City Line.  

Halton's new station will be at Daresbury, on the edge of Runcorn between Chester and Warrington.  There's a large business and technology park here and plans for lots of new homes so the new station will open up the area.  It's not an especially great line, to be honest.  Halton might have benefited more from an often-suggested station at Beechwood, where the line crosses the West Coast Main Line to Liverpool and would therefore mean Runcorn would get a great spot for interchanging.  

The line's in a tunnel here, though, so that would be extraordinarily expensive, not to mention the difficulty of building on a packed railway line with fast trains running through to London.  Perhaps when HS2 to Liverpool is built and there's more capacity and HAHAHAHA I COULDN'T FINISH THAT SENTENCE WITH A STRAIGHT FACE.  So there you go: Daresbury it is.

The intriguing new station is on the Wirral, at Woodchurch, and not just because it's the one closest to my house.  This part of the peninsula is a station desert, which is a problem because the Woodchurch and Beechwood estates are two of the most deprived in the county.  A fast rail link to the city centre would be a valuable asset, and the fact that it's next to a junction on the M53 and would enable a nice park and ride is a bonus.

The problem is, that's not an electrified Merseyrail line; that's the Borderlands Line to Wrexham, currently operated by diesel trains and terminating at Bidston.  Woodchurch has always been on the drawing board but for when the line is electrified, something which hasn't happened and probably never will (if we can't electrify the Midland Main Line I don't think the tracks through Caergwrle are top of anyone's list at Network Rail).  

Announcing that Woodchurch is definitely going to be built therefore raises a question: what trains will serve it?  The value of the station would be bringing it into Merseyrail; if it's still getting the sort-of-one an hour service it gets right now, it's not worth bothering with, especially if those services then end at Bidston.  You could electrify the line as far as Woodchurch (not forgetting there's another station, Upton, in between), but third rail electrification is frowned upon these days as too dangerous, so you'd need overhead electrification, which would need new hybrid trains.

Of course, Merseyrail already has some hybrid trains: the battery ones that go to Headbolt Lane.  And after their disastrous early days that service seems to have settled down and runs pretty well.  You'd need to buy some more new trains though, and are Merseytravel really going to give Stadler some more money after all the hassle they've caused?  

If you're extending Merseyrail, too, with the minimum two trains an hour, preferably four, in each direction expected, then that leaves very little room for Wrexham trains.  Meaning they get cut back as well, much as happened with Northern trains at Headbolt Lane.  In the process, you make the Wrexham Line even less attractive as a route.  

The other question about Woodchurch is where it'll be.  Looking at the map you'd expect it right next to the motorway and the dual carriageway Woodchurch Road, where all the traffic is.  The problem is, that's not handy for the estate that gives it its name.  The M53 scythes across the land between the railway and the estate in a cutting so it's pretty hard to get to. 

There is this footpath under the motorway connecting the high school to the Holmlands Estate across the way which could be used to provide access.  Putting the station there though would mean losing that connectivity to the buses and motorway traffic.  It's a bind: are you building the station for pedestrians or drivers, for people already on buses or to tempt them away from it?

The final development is the most surprising of all, because I don't think anybody even knew it was on the cards: a million pounds to revamp the entrance to Moorfields.  The station's ticket office has always been odd because it's up an escalator: you have to go up to reach the underground.  The reason for this is an ambitious 1970s scheme to build a network of pedestrian footbridges across the city centre, a quite mad scheme which unsurprisingly died a horrible death and has mostly been demolished.  It means there's an ugly void under the entrance which, unsurprisingly, attracts people who need shelter or who want to perform unsavoury acts out of view. 

The ideal plan would be to knock it all down and start again, but that's never going to happen.  That tube on the left hand side of the photo contains the escalators underground; there are cross passageways barely beneath the street that would have to be avoided.  It might happen if there was enough demand for space that an expensive oversite development could pay for it, but right opposite Moorfields is a Yates' Wine Lodge that's been closed and abandoned for twenty years with no sign of it going anywhere so there clearly isn't the demand.

What's happening instead is a bit of remedial action to make it more user friendly.  A new staircase will come down to the street in a straight line, a relief for anyone who knows the current arrangement which involves a blind corner on a landing favoured as a place to hang out by unsavoury types.  The space underneath the escalator hall will be filled in.  I should imagine this is where the bike racks will be moved to, which makes sense: it'll be secure and lockable but out of the way.  It removes the security concerns and makes it a more pleasing place to visit.  Plus there's new lighting and shiny signage.  I do like a shiny sign.

There you go.  A load of negativity rescued by a nice little bit of positivity at the end.  I may be a cynical bastard but sometimes I'm happy.

Prologue: Bustitution

So I've been away in Cumbria, and now I'm back.  I'm going to dribble out blog posts about my trip over the next few days; as regular readers will know, I don't half go on sometimes, and there's a lot to write about.  My four day trip will probably be half a dozen posts by the time I finish.  At least.  I mean, here's a blog post that's just about a part of the trip to get to Barrow.  This is the kind of in-depth oversharing you'll soon be getting.  Just so you're warned.

**********

Wherever possible, I avoid rail replacement buses.  Sometimes you can't help it.  I've been pushed off a broken down train at Hooton a few times and loaded onto a knackered Cumfy Bus.  That's unavoidable.

I'd never experienced planned engineering works before, but the line between Preston and Lancaster was being worked on, so I didn't have much choice.  A bus was waiting at the side of Preston station to take me to Carnforth.  Or rather, a coach was waiting.  This wasn't a decommissioned double decker, pulled out of the depot in a crisis.  It was swish - leather seats, lap belts, Radio 2 playing softly in the background.  I picked a seat at random and immediately realised my mistake.

In front of me was a group of lads.  I'd been so focussed on finding an empty seat I hadn't really paid attention to my fellow passengers, and now I found myself behind a row of boys in their early twenties, coming down from a weekend of revelry in Liverpool.  One is wearing a feather boa and a straw hat; the other three are wearing matching green hoodies with obscene caricatures on the back.  I dearly hope it wasn't a stag do, because they all look like they only started shaving last week.

The fifth member of the party arrives on the bus, in a hoodie but wearing a baseball cap as well.  "Give us a look then!"  I turn around.  There are two girls sat on the row behind me.  They're eating chicken and chips out of boxes; their faces are as orange as the deep fried meat.  Each girl has a window seat; they're together, but they each need an aisle seat to accommodate their enormous handbags.  Leather studded holdalls you could comfortably use to shoplift watermelons.

I realised I was trapped in the middle of some rampaging hormones.  The lads must have flirted with the girls, and the girls had flirted with the boys, and now this paunchy old fart with glasses had come and sat in between them.  I'm trapped.  If I change seats now, it will be glaringly obvious I'm just trying to get away.  They might turn on me.  It'll be like being trapped on the worst school trip of all time.  I shrink into the seat and pray this journey won't be long.

"Get it off!" shouts one of the girls, and the boy in the baseball cap takes his hat off.  He's completely bald, but fake hair has been scribbled all over his skull, a kind of ink Max Wall effect.  "We did it when he passed out!" the fat boy in the feather boa crows.  Unnecessarily, I feel.

"That's going to be hell to get off," says one of the girls, her mouth agape.

"It's only a Sharpie," he shrugs, but he pulls the baseball cap back on and slides into his seat as the coach pulls away.

We head north out of the city centre.  I like Preston.  I've been here a few times, including staying here for three days while I did some exams for work.  I got a professional qualification and a lot of migraines out of it.  It's a decent, middle tier city, even if I don't approve of them pulling down the beautiful bus station.

The boys are swapping war stories about their weekend.  "I tell you when I was worst," says boa boy.  "In that Beatles bar.  Fucking rough as fuck."  Liverpool: City of Culture.

The fifth member of the party, the geekiest looking boy with glasses and no neck, has been exiled to my row and sits across the aisle from me.  He leans over his mates in front and waves an empty Monster can.  "I tell you what: I've had two of these and I reckon I could keep going.  What'd you reckon?  Hit t'pub when we get back?  Proper session?"  There are murmurs of agreement.

I put my backpack in the hold.  I feel lost without it.  I worry about someone else picking it up, and my boxer shorts going astray.  I need it close.  It's a comfort thing.

The girls have lost interest in the boys.  The more they've talked, the louder they've boasted about how rat arsed they were, the more disinterested they've got.  Now they've leaned back into their seats and are playing with their Samsungs, trying to tap at touchscreens with enormous fake fingernails.  I assume they're texting.  Maybe they're making notes for sarcastic blog posts.

Baseball cap suddenly turns to his mate alongside, a man with the douchiest possible beard.  It's a couple of thin trails of hair that cling to the underside of his chin like a velcro strip, with a soul patch under his bottom lip.  It looks faker than the Sharpie hair cut.  "Remember that lass who tried to get us in t'lapdancing bar? 'You want to come in here?'  She proper humped you!"  They guffaw, gurgling dirty laughs, not realising that they just exposed the limits of their sexual misadventures during the weekend.  

They're the only ones talking on the whole bus.  Everyone else is either a single traveller like me, or just maintaining a dignified silence.  The weekenders' memories are soiling the whole bus.  I wondered where they went in Liverpool.  Just so I know never to go there, ever.

A new voice is suddenly competing with them, a Cockney.  He's talking into a mobile about his work and it seems we all need to know just how important this call is.  He's been upselling and there are some with fifteen thousand points and some with only seven thousand and it's all incredibly dull but he's still shouting about it.

Outside the window there's heavy, driving rain, and a miserable stretch of anonymous motorway.  Hurry up, I think.  Hurry up.  I want to get off this coach.  It's starting to feel like a hostage situation.  The SAS will come smashing through the windows if we don't leave the M6 soon.

"Who wrote 'Your Name' on my wrist?" says the geeky one.  They laugh again, and take the piss, and I realise his name is Scott.  Of course.

They start planning the rest of the day, who to call and invite to their "session".  Not Kevin: he's got a girlfriend and is boring now.  "Marisa and Kevin are always in t'corner.  Remember when she were sat in t'corner at that party, crying?  She's always crying and he has to go over and comfort her."  That bastard.

Feather boa agrees.  "Then Corrie'll have one drink, she'll start crying, do one song on t'karaoke then go home 'cos she's too pissed.  She'll last an hour."  Is this what Barrow's going to be like, I wonder?  I make a mental note to barricade myself in my hotel room after five pm.  

I'm hungry now.  The smell of chips still lingers in the enclosed, sealed tube of the coach.  I haven't eaten since breakfast, and I won't be able to eat until we reach Barrow.  

We pull off the motorway, onto a spur, and the passengers start to stir.  We must be getting close to Carnforth.  A man stands up so he can pull on his migraine-inducing jumper.  The lanes out the window look sodden - not a good portent for my walking holiday.

And now, oh hell now, they've started singing.  At first I thought it was some kind of folk song, and then I realised they were singing about "fuckin' Matalan" and "t'old NatWest" and I start to wonder how many of them I could kill before the other lads overwhelmed me.  Probably a couple.  I could fashion a rudimentary garotte out of the seatbelt.  Jam the buckle in an eyeball.

Carnforth!  The bus pulls into the car park, and there's a sigh: it's either the hydraulics for the door or the relieved passengers escaping the second verse of the song.  I snatch up my bag from the luggage area and almost sprint for the waiting train, trying to avoid looking at the station.  I don't have time to explore it, and I'd want to see Brief Encounter again before I did, so I could properly recreate the scenes in my head.  I just barrel onto the First TransPennine Express train and plump myself in a seat.  Sweet silence.

"This'll do."

DEAR GOD WHY DO YOU HATE ME?

The lads are here.  They've come into this carriage.  They've plonked themselves in the seats in front of me.  They've broken out cans of Strongbow and bottles of Becks.

"Here's the game: one drink for every station.  One drink for every waterfall.  And you have to drink the whole time crossing bridges."

Fuck.

Acton Up

It started, as so much of my life seems to these days, with a tweet.

Though the London Transport Museum (and especially its shop) is a place of pilgrimage for me, I'd never been to the Acton Depot.  This is a storage area for the Museum where they keep exhibits they can't feature at Covent Garden.  It's only open for a half a dozen times a year, and it had never coincided with my schedule before.

This time, though, I decided to be spontaneous.  So The BF and I booked some tickets at the last minute, boarded a train to London at the crack of doom and were soon in the capital, ready for some historic transport fondling.  I should, at this point, thank The BF for his tolerance and willingness to wander round a depot.  He deserves a medal, and it almost makes up for all those Liverpool matches he makes me sit through.

The Depot opened at eleven, and we got there about a quarter past.  Stepping out of Acton Town tube station was a shock.  The queue stretched from the road, up the hill and into the distance; it was like The Inn of the Sixth Happiness.  Fortunately, as we'd bought our tickets in advance, we could cut ahead to the front, but I still felt like breaking into a chorus of "This Old Man" as I reached the head.

Inside was a sort of Ideal Home Exhibition, with trains.  It was packed full of people, objects and stalls. In addition to the Museum's regular collections, there were also model trains on display, plus family events and bus rides.

The Depot's a working space, so unlike the Covent Garden museum, most of the stock here was unlabelled.  Some had been furnished with a laminated luggage tag to give you a clue, but in most cases it was just left to the visitor to interpret what they were seeing.  Some of it was obvious:

Some of it, less so:

At the rear of the hall were the vehicles: buses, trams and trains.  They were in various states of repair.  Some were ready for exhibition, but there just wasn't anywhere for them to go; some were being rebuilt by dedicated professionals; others were barely recognisable as a train in the first place.

I passed the buses with a flicker of interest - because, you know, buses - and headed towards the railway displays.  Half a dozen trains, neatly lined up beside one another.  I recognised the recently retired Victoria Line train, still with its commemorative plaque on the front, and a rusty Waterloo & City train in Network SouthEast colours, but the rest came under the category of "trains.  Pretty".  I apologise to readers who were expecting a thorough analysis of the A Stock.

Can I be a bit rude now?  There were a lot of families at the Depot, a lot of casual visitors, a lot of people enjoying themselves.  But there was also a core of gentlemen who were socially underdeveloped.  I have not been pushed, shoved and just plain mistreated in a public place in my life.  I was elbowed out of the way so that men could get to their favourite displays.  Complete strangers stepped right in front of my raised camera so they could take their own shot.

Trainspotting is, I know, a solitary hobby, and so it's no surprise that these men (because they were all men) were a bit lacking in graces.  It didn't stop me from wanting to kick them firmly in the inspection pit.  This lady had the right idea.  Clearly she'd abandoned her husband, and found a quiet corner behind a double decker to read her book while he got on with it:

Pushing on, I carried on to the mezzanine level, with the collection of LT signs.  All in the beautiful Johnstone typeface, easily one of the most beautiful fonts ever made.  I made a valiant attempt to persuade The BF that our living room would look marvellous if we redecorated it with a wall of enamel roundels, but he wasn't convinced.

A display of diagrams, pulled from the walls of the stations, allowed you to trace the tiniest of change in the network - the hatched outline of the Victoria Line in the Sixties, Aldwych disappearing in the Nineties, the DLR exploding all over the right hand side of the map.

Below that was the small object storage.  With its rows of wire mesh cages, it looked like a low-budget zoo, only instead of monkeys and birds there were clocks, litter bins and lamps.  Strange lumps of metal were preserved here, for a very good reason I'm sure, but as far as I was concerned they just looked like they'd fallen off of a train somewhere and they were keeping it safe until they worked out what it was for.

A field of architectural models proved to be a revelation.  You can stare at as many CGI representations as you like, but nothing compares with a 3-D visualisation.  A model of Oxford Circus, made for the arrival of the Victoria Line, showed a mess of interconnected tunnels that boggled the mind.  It's not just a tunnel for the trains, and one for the people; there are levels of transfers, interchange passageways, escalator banks, all reaching above and below one another.  It made you appreciate the problems of the current planners for, say, Crossrail, threading their new tunnels in between these sprawling spaghetti masses.  Next to that, the cold white simplicity of Canary Wharf - an awe-inspiring station in the flesh - seemed almost dull.

Not that I didn't want to reach in and have a play with those dinky model people.  Even more tempting to play with was a display by the Southern Lego Train Club, which featured a Lego Underground train.  If it had been driven by a tiny Russell Tovey and then blown up by SPECTRE it would have been the ultimate experience, and I could have died a content man there and then.

I spent a small fortune in the shop, and then we left.  There were still people queuing to get in, and to ride on the Routemaster outside; the staff were already looking a bit frazzled, but in great humour.  In an ideal world the Depot would be open all the time, or there would be the chance for more of the stock to be on permanent display for us to enjoy.  As it was, I was pleased to have seen just a tiny glimpse into their backroom.

Can someone arrange for all that Lego to be sent to my house now, please?

You can find the dates of forthcoming Depot open days here.

The Walrus and the Tart

I did something unusual on Sunday night: I got a bus.  I'd been out for a couple of pints in town and instead of getting the train back I took the 437 to West Kirby home.

I don't normally take buses for a few reasons.  I like trains, obviously, and Merseyrail provide a good regular service.  I've never been really comfortable on buses, and they seem to attract a disproportionate amount of insane people.  I like the certainty of railway stations and train lines.  Finding out where a bus goes to and from is a hassle, especially if you're going somewhere unfamiliar, and it's not always easy to find out where to go (Merseytravel's bus timetable site is a nightmare in this regard).

However, it was a wet, miserable night, I didn't fancy the walk home, and I had access to wi-fi in the pub so I was able to do a few internet searches to find out where I was going and where my nearest stop was.  I had a bit of a panic when I asked for a single to Claughton, and the driver said "where?"; it was on the route but it seemed he didn't understand me for some reason.

The 437 was comfortable and quiet.  There were a smattering of people, and none of them seemed to be particularly mad.  The last time I got the bus under the river was a Saturday night Tunnel Bus, fifteen years ago, with a (cough) gentleman friend; it was like being trapped inside a vomit soaked sex club for ten minutes, with all sorts of drunken, debauched behaviour surrounding me.  This was much more civilised and pleasant.

I got off the bus and walked the five minutes or so home.  I wondered why I didn't take the bus more often.  I realised it was the little things - the uncertainties about fares and bus stops and routes, the timetables being a bit odd.  Just niggly points that mean I'd rather walk to a Merseyrail station than head for the bus stop at the end of my street.

And that's why we need Walrus: for people like me.  An all in one smart card that is the key to Merseyside's entire network.  Because I'd be quite happy to swipe onto the first bus I saw and see where it went.  I'd be more confident at risking an unknown bus that was going in vaguely the right direction if I knew my Walrus card had all the cost covered.  It'd also mean I wouldn't have wasted the return portion of my train ticket - I wouldn't have been charged for it in the first place.  It's something I've done before in London, with my Oyster card - nipped onto a double decker rather than walk to the South Bank, or take an Overground train for a change instead of the Underground.

The Walrus would open up the bus and train network for people who don't use public transport often.  Stick one in your wallet with twenty quid stored on it, and then just hop aboard a bus when it's raining, or the ferry when you fancy a change from Merseyrail, or a train into town because you can't face the idea of parking.  It takes away the worry of how much and where you go and what you do.  Walk in - waft your Walrus - walk out.  Simple.

I know this isn't brain surgery.  The Oyster's done all the ground work for us.  It just came home to me on Sunday what a great thing the Walrus card will be.  I can't wait.